Private betaChangelog Observer is running with a small group of early users. The privacy policy and the terms of service are still being written; until they are published, please treat the service as a preview. Our security page says what is stored and where.

Quickstart

About ten minutes from sign-in to the first event. The fast path uses a coding agent; the plain-HTTP path is below it.

1. Sign in and create a key

Sign in with GitHub, Google or an email link. A workspace is created for you. Open Connect an agent, name the key after the machine or agent that will use it, and keep the default scopes: project:read, project:write, events:read. The key is shown once; it starts with co_live_.

Rules and destinations are separate grants (rules:write, destinations:write). Leave them off the first key; add them later, deliberately, when you want the agent to apply rules or add where alerts go.

2. Connect Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http changelog-observer \
  https://api.changelog.observer/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <key>"

Any other MCP client takes the same address and header. Then, in your repository, ask:

Set up changelog.observer for this repo.

The agent reads your manifests, matches each dependency to the vendor catalogue, creates a project, registers the sources and reports back: the project, its private inbound email address, which dependencies got automatic sources, and anything only you can do (such as confirming a vendor’s email subscription). It never clicks links for you.

3. Or do it over HTTP

Create a project, then send its dependency inventory. The same two calls work from any language.

curl -X POST https://api.changelog.observer/v1/projects \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <key>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "payments-api"}'
curl -X PUT https://api.changelog.observer/v1/projects/<project_id>/reconcile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <key>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "dependencies": [
      { "name": "stripe", "external_ref": "npm:stripe", "type": "api", "importance": "high", "environments": ["production"] },
      { "name": "openai", "external_ref": "npm:openai", "type": "api", "importance": "normal", "environments": ["production"] }
    ]
  }'

The response lists what was added and kept, and what the platform proposes to remove (it never removes on its own). Dependencies that match the catalogue start polling within five minutes.

4. Watch the first events arrive

Open the Overview. New sources back-fill their recent history, so you will see events within a few minutes; back-filled events are shown but not delivered, so nobody is paged about last month. From then on, sources are polled every five minutes.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <key>" "https://api.changelog.observer/v1/workspace/events?family=status&limit=20"

5. Decide where alerts go

Under a project’s Rules & destinations, add an email address. Webhooks and ticket systems are added through the API with a destinations:write key (the webhook’s signing secret is returned once) or from the same page. Without rules of your own, urgent and high-priority events go out at once and the rest wait for the daily digest at 08:00 UTC.

6. Give email-only vendors the address

Each project has a private inbound address, shown on its Settings page and in GET /v1/projects. Subscribe to a vendor’s notifications with it. Confirmation links wait for you under Inbox → Action needed. For many vendors the platform is already subscribed and shares the mail with every project that depends on them; the catalogue marks those.

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